November 2011: Sigmund Laufer

Holocaust Prints

Sigmund Laufer (1920-2007) grew up in Berlin until age sixteen, when he emigrated to a northern Palestinian Kibbutz as part of the Youth Aliyah of European Jews threatened by the rise of Nazism in Germany. He then moved to Jerusalem where he met his future wife, Miriam Laufer, also an artist and a refugee from Berlin. After the war in June 1947, they emigrated together to New York City, where they had two children, Abigail Laufer and Susan Bee (Laufer). Sigmund began working for the Board of Jewish Education as a book designer, calligrapher, and art director of the children's publication, World Over. He was employed by the BJE for 44 years from 1948 to 1992. Upon moving to New York, Laufer simultaneously began his career as a printmaker and artist, and created black and white and color etchings and lithographs. His first exhibition was just two years after arriving in New York, as part of a group show at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 1949. He had solo shows in New York and was included in many group shows. His work was widely reviewed. Laufer's prints are part of many collections, private and public, in the United States and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the National Library in Paris, and the National Museum in Jerusalem. This series of nine Holocaust etchings, which were created in the 1960s, have not been exhibited together since then.


September 2011: Curatorial Show

Philadelphia Future Perfect

The first Brodsky Gallery exhibit of the 2011/2012 season will feature prints of Philadelphia city-planning maps depicting large-scale projects that never came to pass—at least not quite how the maps had promised them. Ranging from hand-drawn sketches to scaled blue-prints, this selection gathers proposals from architects and planning authorities from throughout Philadelphia's urban history, revealing the cities that could have been. Harris Steinberg, executive director of PennPraxis and life-long Philadelphian, will begin the evening with a discussion of maps, city planning, and Philadelphia histories past and present. The talk will be followed by a reception during which attendees will be invited to read and peruse the maps. This opening also serves as the kick-off for a year-long collaborative chapbook project which will aim to collect writings from and about these "alternative Philadelphias."


March 2011: Derek Beaulieu

co-sponsored by: Writers Without Borders

Author of five books of poetry (most recently the visual poem suite Silence) and three volumes of conceptual fiction (most recently the short fiction collection How to Write), Derek Beaulieu's work is consistently praised as some of the most radical and challenging contemporary Canadian writing. His work has appeared in over 150 journals internationally, has been translated into Turkish, Polish, French and Icelandic and has been featured in over 200 small press publications. His conceptual novels Flatland and Local Colour, both explorations of texts without texts, were published in the UK and Finland respectively and are limit cases of prose.


January 2011: Linh Dinh

State of the Union

Born in Vietnam, Linh Dinh is a poet, fiction writer, and photographer. His photo blog, State of the Union, tracks our "deteriorating socialscape" with 2,100 photos and counting. Dinh is the author of two collections of stories from Seven Stories Press, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004), five books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003), American Tatts (Chax 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School 2006), Jam Alerts (Chax 2007) and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy (Chax 2009), and a novel, Love Like Hate (Seven Stories 2010). His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, Best American Poetry 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2006).


November 2010: Susan Bee

A Retrospective

co-sponsored by: Feminism/s and the Wexler Family Fund

Susan Bee is an artist, editor and designer who works and lives in New York City. Her work examines and questions intersections of identity, gender roles and secular Jewish culture. As an artist, she believes strongly in the role of the imagination and the importance of poetry, humor, irony, memory, and fantasy in art. She also believes in idiosyncratic, individualistic, and eccentric art making. She has published six artist's books with Granary Books, including collaborations with poets: Bed Hangings, with Susan Howe, A Girl's Life, with Johanna Drucker, Log Rhythms and Little Orphan Anagram with Charles Bernstein and The Burning Babe and Other Poems with Jerome Rothenberg. She is coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist's Writings, Theory, and Criticism, with writings by over 100 artists, critics, and poets, published by Duke University Press in 2000. She was the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues from 1986-1996 and is the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.


September 2010: Hiroyuki Nakamura

Hiroyuki Nakamura was born in 1977 and grew up in a suburb of the small industrial city Hamamatsu in Japan. Like many Japanese children, Nakamura was fascinated with trains and at the early age of five he started to photograph this fascination in earnest. When he was eleven years old, Nakamura and his family moved to Chicago where he spent three years at a private Japanese middle school with the intent of returning to Japan for high school. During that time, Nakamura planned out a series of road trips with his family in order to photograph trains and the vast American landscape. By the end of middle school, Nakamura and his family had driven through most of the 50 states, an experience which Nakamura says certainly influenced his decision to stay in America when his parents returned to Japan.

After graduating from a private military academy turned prep school, Nakamura moved to Philadelphia in 1996 and studied photography at Drexel University. While at Drexel, he started a series of what he called "one-of-a-kind" photographs in which he treated his printed paper negative as a canvas; drawing, scratching and adding other elements to create surrealistic mixed-media prints which he then enlarged. In 2000, he moved to New York City where he received his MFA in photography in 2002 from the School of Visual Arts. While at SVA, Nakamura started moving more towards mixed media photography, until finally replacing the film negative altogether with canvas in 2004. Since then, Nakamura has been painting exclusively. Currently he lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.


March 2010: Group Show

Synaptic Mimes: the Private Spectacular

Synaptic Mimes: the Private Spectacular was a seven-artist exhibition, featuring work by Matthew Albanese, Nadja Bournonville, Miguel Cárdenas, Selena Kimball, Mary Mattingly, Ryan Mrozowski, and Patricia Smith.


January 2010: Jessica Nissen

Uncommonly Selected: Rorschach Drawings

Jessica Nissen splits her time between NYC, where she works as a scenic artist for the entertainment industry and Vermont, where she keeps a studio and occasionally teaches in the Art Dept. of Middlebury College. Nissen received an MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art in 1998, a BA from Middlebury College in 1990 and earned undergraduate credits from the Rhode Island School of Design and Tyler. She has been a fellow at The Corporation of Yaddo and the Chautauqua Institution. Since 1991 she has exhibited extensively and has participated both as an artist and as an organizer/curator in several large-scale interdisciplinary art events.


November 2009: Christian BÖk

Umlaut Machine: Selected Visual Works

co-sponsored by: Writers Without Borders

Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994, Coach House Press), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Eunoia (2001, Coach House Books), a bestselling work of experimental literature and winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bok has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bok is currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary.


September 2009: Group Show

Poem Posters: Small Press Broadsides

In conjunction with the broadside exhibition Poem Posters, comprising letterpress work from small printshops around the country, San Fransico to Brooklyn. Poem Posters presses included Ugly Duckling Press of Brooklyn, NY, The Common Press of Philadelphia, PA, Littoral Press of Oakland, CA, Dead Skin Press of Portland, ME, Hermetic Press of Minneapolis, MN, New Lights Press of Oakland, CA, Phylum Press of New Haven, CT, Propolis Press of Northamton, MA, Axel & Otto of San Francisco, CA, Intima Press of New York, NY, Auto Types Press of New York, NY, C&C Press of Pajaro, CA, Punch Press of Buffalo, NY, Poltroon Press of Berkeley, CA, and Small Fires Press of Memphis, TN. KWH Art presented a press fair to showcase a number of press projects from all over the country, San Francisco to Brooklyn. The exhibition's title is borrowed from Charles Henri Ford's short experimental film featuring (and named after) his 1965 Poem Posters, exhibition at New York's Cordier & Ekstrom gallery.


April 2009: Curatorial Show

Spin Glasses and Other Frustrated Systems

Spin Glasses and Other Frustrated Systems comprised a series of wallpaper patterns designed from a constrained set of source materials: 13 books cherry-picked from one afternoon's visit to Strand Bookstore, NYC. Each wall's pattern distorted graphics and schemata from a single book, such as mechanical drawing manuals, cathedral architectural plans, encyclopedias, and texts on linguistics and condensed matter physics. In a doubled-over process of abstraction, diagrammatic information was re-translated and permutated as formal motifs into background noise.

The opening for the exhibit included a group reading from the selected texts, excerpted and doctored by Michelle Taransky, Cecilia Corrigan, Timothy Leonido, Diana Hamilton, Eddie Hopely, Vladimir Zykov, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Trisha Low,Steve McLaughlin, Gregory Laynor, Ian Davisson, Johann Diedrick, and James La Marre.


September 2009: Group Show

That's What She Said: Female Voices in Embroidery

The exhibition included selections from Andrea Dezsö's sampler series "Lessons from My Mother" and Elaine Reichek's "As She Likes It."

Andrea Dezsö is an artist and a writer. She has shown at the Jack Tilton Gallery, The New York Armory Show, Art Basel Miami, Museum of Arts & Design and BravinLee Programs. Her work was reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Print, MarieClaire and Metropolis. Her writing appeared in McSweeney's, Print and Esopus. A book about Dezsö's art, creative process and obsessions titled Andrea Dezsö: Fetish Book was published in 2006. Dezsö is the recipient of a 2008 Kamiyama Fellowship, 2007 NYFA Fellowship, a 2007 Six Points Fellowship and the Ucross Foundation's 2005 Lois Nellie Gill Award for Female Visual Artist of Exceptional Merit. She is Assistant Professor of Media Design at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. You can see some of her work at her website.

Elaine Reichek is an artist known for her use of the age-old medium of embroidery to examine contemporary issues. In many works based upon the sampler—a traditional embroiderer's exercise incorporating narrative images, patterns, and motifs framed by verbal homilies and lessons—Reichek remakes existing images from high and low art, replacing the aphorisms of the sampler with quotations from a wide variety of sources throughout history and literature. Born in New York, she received a B.F.A. from Yale University and a B.A. from Brooklyn College. She has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus, OH, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Belgium, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel. She lives in New York City.